365 Day Journal Challenge

Day 11-Revealed with time.

Write about something that will be revealed with time...

Our children, other’s children.  We won’t know what impact we will have (good or bad) but we have to have faith that the positive things will do are worth it even if we don’t receive an email in ten years saying, “Thanks ___, your advice ten years ago saved my life.” Well, something like this.  We can see a poor drug addicted mother lose her kid to the welfare department and the child can be put in foster care.  Just b/c they came from a drug addicted mother doesn’t mean we assume that the child has no future.  An Indian (India) pediatrician I once took foster children to for checkups while working in another city told me when I took a young infant to him for a check up that we must not  feel sorry if a child has many “strikes” against them (parents on drugs, poverty, so on) because this child chose this path and chose the obstacles that he or she needed to get through to better his soul.  This is his belief but it really sunk in to me.  This was some 8 or so years ago and still remember where I was standing and where he was, even the child I remember.  After 12 yrs of doing this job, I don’t just remember every doctor’s checkup with my kids in my caseload.

What this doctor said got me thinking about my own struggles (which aren’t nearly what many go through) and the possibility that I “signed up for” certain challenges and gifts before I came to this earth.  This thought really brings home the fact that we, as parents, are entrusted with getting our kids to adult age with the tools they need to be the best them they can be but they are not ours to keep, they are to be returned to the world when we are done getting the ready to live out on their own.  These little folks have an agenda and somewhere in their genetic makeup or something like that, there are clues as to what that life’s agenda is.  Some kids gravitate toward transportation interests, some to science, some to music, etc, and sometimes to maybe often, the parents aren’t even good at what the child is good at so it wasn’t due to influence. 

So again, we will not know how the little things we do as parents will influence our kids, that will all be revealed with time, if its revealed at all.  Perhaps, they don’t just tell you how you impacted them but you see little things you did with them being repeated with their kids.  If it’s a good thing you did and they are doing, it can be so rewarding and you will have a silent little pat on the back.  If its not a good thing (repeating addictions, etc) your current situation can still have an impact on their situation-did they fall off the wagon but get back up and try even harder?  Sometimes we make mistakes and our ability to admit them and come out of them with more resilience and some better judgment can do a great deal to teach your kids that it is not a waste of time or energy to improve yourself.  Despite your past mistakes, a child will eventually see what is going on inside a recovering parent, for example.  We all need to do our best and trust that the skills and confidence we instilled in them will carry them further than we possibly could in our earthly positions. 

SWPoet





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